Three-monitor mode

[Lamancha]

I remember the earlier versions of Doom supporting a multi-monitor mode, with the -left and -right command line commands. This was taken out quite early on, something to do with the network code hogging networks, but did anyone ever get it working? Is there a way of getting it working nowadays, and do any of the various source ports support it? Even better, is there a way of making it work on a single computer, either with three monitors or with a special 90 degree 'widescreen' mode?

[david_a]

Well, the only card I know of that can support three monitors is the Matrox Parhelia. The actual support in games for 3 monitors was (and still is) pretty slim, but with Quake3 you could just tweak some config files to get it to run in 3072x768, albeit with some issues. Look here for more info on that. This approach might be a possibility for something like JDoom or ZDoomGL.

I don't know how multi-card multi-monitor setups work, so that might be a possibility as well. I'm thinking that might require special software support, though.

Unfortunately I don't think any port supports the -left and -right flags.

As for that "widescreen mode," I think ZDoom might actually be able to do something like that now. Support for widescreen monitors was added, so maybe you can just set the ratio to something horrific and see what happens.

[Manc]

ZDoom won't spill over to multiple monitors with a widescreen resolution. There's much more that has to into that.

[david_a]

Yes, but it sounded like he wanted some kind of letterboxed mode on a single monitor, which sounds possible.

[Amaster]

My understanding is that the old 3 monitor setup was done through a networked game similar to coop. The left and right screens were just other player cameras that matched the necessary viewpoint. To my knowledge, there were no multi-monitor video cards at the time that this feature was concieved (not for home computers anyway). Instead you would use 3 seperate computers networked together. You can imagine why this feature was not updated along with the rest of the game.

[Russell_P]

Not really relevant to doom, but here's it done for Q3A and Unreal..

http://www.planetquake.com/mhg/

[Manc]

Russell_P said:

Not really relevant to doom, but here's it done for Q3A and Unreal..

http://www.planetquake.com/mhg/

That's cool, and while it says a the top linux and windows 2000, each time it talked about doing stuff for linux only, and I suppose I might try that out (I would hope that a 9800xt could do this), but it looks like a couple special things had to be done to specific linux config files to get it to work.

Can anyone confirm/deny this working on win2k/xp?

[Lamancha]

>>>>
Unfortunately I don't think any port supports the -left and -right flags.
<<<<

Can anybody - in the entire world - confirm ever having seen these being used, in real life? Do they actually work? Has anybody with Doom 0.99 or the pre-1.2 versions tried running it, with -left or -right? That would be an interesting handicapped speedrun thing, to play the game with the left viewport only, so that you have to keep turning right through 90 degrees in order to shoot anything.

Like a lot of people I used to play Doom at college/university, where multi-computer multi-monitor setups were feasible, but I could never be bothered to set three computers up. It was taken out with version 1.2, I think, because of the issue with network broadcast packets (waves hands, technical solution). It's one of those odd things which I remember from back in the day, back when E1M1 didn't have the secret bit with the lift.

For that matter, did Doom ever have support for the abortive VR headset things which were briefly fashionable at the time? Probably a silly idea given that you wouldn't have been able to look up and down.

[david_a]

Lamancha said:

For that matter, did Doom ever have support for the abortive VR headset things which were briefly fashionable at the time? Probably a silly idea given that you wouldn't have been able to look up and down.

I'm not entirely certain that there was built-in support for it, but I remember a VR headset round-up in an old PC Gamer that talked about playing Doom with them. Using the headtracking feature was quite stupid, since moving your head down would make you run forward :P I believe Dark Forces was mentioned as having one of the best implementations at that time, although Descent won hands down.

[nightice]

I want to get Quake to work with one of those. :P